Tom King’s CRM Plus --
Ruminations on "cultural resource management," environmental impact assessment, and related esoteric topics, by a curmudgeon who seldom has anything good to say about anything.

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Monday, November 14, 2016

CRM and the Rise of the T-Rump

No, I’m not going to accuse cultural resource management,
that quaint and probably soon-to-vanish professional practice, of causing or
even much facilitating the successes of Donald Trump and his merry band. I
think, though, that before this dismal moment passes and everybody moves on to
other fields of endeavor, we ought to think about whether and how CRM practice
has reflected the broad social phenomena that made Trump’s victories (thus far)
possible.

Many commentators are commenting – rather too late – that Trump’s
rise was not wholly a matter of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and selfishness,
though obviously all those played their parts, and will continue to. Trump also
tapped into a strong and not-unjustified feeling in what’s left of the U.S.
middle class that the nation’s elites are scornful of the concerns, beliefs,
values and fears of “the common people.” Those who voted for him will doubtless
soon find out that the T-Rump is even more scornful, but he looked different,
he looked like he’d shake things up, kick some ass, and a lot of people – about
a quarter of those eligible to vote, apparently, and a strategically situated
almost half of those who actually voted – thought that some elite ass needed
kicking.

A small collection of those asses, I think, comprise those
of CRM practitioners, both in government and in the “industry.”

CRM has become a very elitist enterprise – maybe always has
been. This will doubtless be disputed by the rough-tough archaeologists in its
ranks, but I think it’s obvious. Although the laws under which we work were
certainly enacted in the expectation that they would be good for the people who
vote and pay taxes, CRM practitioners, on the whole, are concerned only with
finding, documenting, and maybe occasionally preserving buildings, sites, districts,
structures and objects that meet esoteric criteria promulgated by a small
coterie of professionals in the National Park Service. To many if not most
practitioners, how local people feel about those places is irrelevant; what
matters is whether a professional thinks they meet the criteria. Similarly, it
doesn’t much matter how regular people feel about a proposed project’s; what
matters is what an agency official and a State Historic Preservation Officer
decide about whether and how the criteria of adverse effect apply.

So you think your farm, or your neighborhood, is culturally
important and worth preserving? Well, maybe OK, but only if you can persuade
the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) that it is. Value your view down
the street or across the valley? Sorry, it’s not part of what the SHPO or the
National Park Service thinks makes the street or valley eligible for the
National Register, so we can’t deal with it.

It cuts both ways, of course. Not much interested in
preserving 20th century tract houses or blocks and blocks of
warehouses? Sorry, they’re eligible for the National Register so we really need
to preserve them – or at least go through a lot of tedious processes before
taking them down. Don’t want to preserve those inefficient, ugly old windows?
Sorry, they’re part of the historic fabric. Think it was maybe a mistake to
build that brutalist addition on the old courthouse? Too bad, it’s on the
Register now, so we gotta keep it.

And if you’re culturally invested in something that’s not
a building, site, district, structure or object, you’re utterly out of luck.
Value your multi-generation cattle-ranching lifestyle? Tough; your damn cows
are tearing up landscapes that need to be made safe for hikers from the city,
and sad to say, your lifestyle just isn’t eligible for the National Register.
Want to protect free-ranging burros or wild carp? Sorry, they’re not “places,”
so we can’t deal with them.

Of course, we elite federal and state officials and pricy
consultants will “consult” with the unwashed masses, but only about stuff that
fits into our world-view, according to our systems. And we have come to
understand “consultation” not to mean dialogue or discussion, but simply “informing,”
“educating,” “listening” and getting “input” – all of which can then be
ignored.

All this is, as some wise pundits have lately pointed out, exactly
the kind of behavior that makes people become sick of the authorities and
prepared to toss the bums out – regardless of who or what replaces them.

If we survive the rampage of the T-Rump (I doubt if we will,
perhaps at all), I hope we can take some lessons and apply them to all our
endeavors, including those that involve us with “cultural resources.” We need
to recognize that everybody’s got culture, whose “resources” are only sometimes
the kinds of things that CRM professionals appreciate, but all of which deserve
consideration. And that professional values don’t by default trump (sic) those
of other people. And that the “consultation” we say we do isn’t consultation at
all if it’s not dialogue, aimed at achieving some kind of meeting of the
minds.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Mr. King, I admire your work in general and your critical stance toward CRM and Section 106 and bureaucracy, not to mention your expertise and commitment to fixing things that are broken. I'm startled when I fin may working for the Agencies in archaeo who don't know of your work or your arguments, and I encourage people to read your stuff.

But I do not share your willingness to trust 'the locals' to always do the right thing about their resources, nor do I share your blanket mistrust of the gov't's imposition of rules and regulations that might contradict the thoughts and feelings of those locals. And I'm sure you exaggerate to make a point and to stir argument . . . which I will be happy to supply.

Take Manzanar, for example. If locals had their way, Manzanar would today be what it was after it was abandoned and the LA Department of Water and Power razed it and locals took to shooting at the cemetery monument, pillaging the dumps and cutting trees for firewood, and after the winds and the sands and the floods begin to bury what was left under silt and tamarisk and tumbleweed.

Instead, due to the effort of non-locals, e.g. the Japanese-American community, some of whom were unwilling guests at Manzanar, the place is a site of conscience, and an effective reminder of the fruits of demagoguery and the baser instincts of a frightened and alienated populace. Many 'locals' would still love to eradicate this blot on patriotism, this barricade to non-native elk that are so easy to hunt among the apple trees. They would like the water to be restored to the reservoir, because it was a nice place to party and swim, but beyond that, the whole re-creation of the concentration camp is anathema.

This is a good, but not the only, example of what would be lost if there weren't some form of guidance and higher authority than merely acceding to the whims of locals. And that authority might not withstand the latest whim, the election of DT . . . but Heritage can't be entrusted only to the Bundies, the pothunters and the VFW, among others.

As an ex-historic preservation bureaucrat, who began my career in the dirt, I can see that it may indeed be time to clean up the house a bit. While we like to think of ourselves as working for the greater good, we have become a bit of an elite group (apparently according to ACRA, CRM is a billion dollar "industry"). When people started using and misusing terms like "archaeological clearance" or "SHPO clearance", we were setting ourselves up as the judge and jury, of the "things" of prehistory/history. I worry most that we lost a lot of folks, who really thought this stuff was cool and important, but fear the bureaucrats messing with their lands and projects. We need to recover those folks, as well as the folks who don't think the archaeologists and historians know how to protect the things most important to them. MKeller

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Welcome to Tom King's CRM Plus

Welcome to my blog on topics related to "cultural resource management," whatever that may mean to you or me. I hope you find some interest in what you read here, that you'll add your own contributions, and that you'll encourage others to have a look. Thanks!

About Me

Thomas F. King holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California Riverside (1976), and has worked since the 1960s in the evolving fields of research and management variously referred to as heritage, cultural resource management, and historic preservation. He is particularly known for his work with Section 106 of the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act, and with indigenous and other traditional cultural places.

King is the author and editor of ten textbooks and tradebooks (See http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-F.-King/e/B001IU2RWK/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1353864454&sr=1-2-ent) as well as scores of journal articles, popular articles, and internet offerings on heritage topics.His career includes the conduct of archaeological research in California and the Micronesian islands, management of academy-based and private cultural resource consulting organizations, helping establish government historic preservation systems in the freely associated states of Micronesia, oversight of U.S. government project review for the federal government’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, service as a litigant and expert witness in heritage-related lawsuits, and extensive work as a consultant and educator in heritage-related topics. He is the co-author of the U.S. National Park Service's government-wide guidance on "traditional cultural properties" (TCPs; see http://www.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/pdfs/nrb38.pdf). He occasionally teaches short classes about historic preservation project review, traditional cultural places, and consultation with indigenous groups, and consults and writes as TFKing PhD LLC. Current major clients include several American Indian tribes and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.